US Apple Store now showing July 2 ship date for new iPhone 4 preorders

We admit it: due to an editing mixup, our earlier post wasn't all the way accurate at first. While AT&T's preorder allocation for launch day (June 24) was all done, Apple was still cruising along. iPhone 4 for all! For... about four hours.

As of a few minutes ago, with some intermittent switching back to the original date and variation among different areas of the country, the US Apple Store website is now showing a pretty consistent July 2nd delivery shipping date for new preorders. If you refresh your browser (remember, hold down the shift key to recache the page!) you may see the date switch back and forth again... but any way you slice it, we're close to the bottom of the box.

Despite some near-catastrophic systems issues during the day for Apple and AT&T, and some breathtaking account security problems on AT&T's upgrade pages (users seeing the wrong account when they log in to your site is never good), it seems like the infrastructure held together enough to work through a huge surge of business today.

We won't know for sure how many iPhones were preordered today until & unless Apple and AT&T choose to share, but it's easy to say 'millions' with a straight face.